


The Mistimed Bing

by Siria



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:31:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15804972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: "Oh, whoa, okay, wait, hold up." Scott came to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, clutching his bag of tacos to his chest. "I think he actuallywasasking me out."





	The Mistimed Bing

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Trinityofone for betaing!

"Oh, whoa, okay, wait, hold up." Scott came to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, clutching his bag of tacos to his chest. "I think he actually _was_ asking me out."

"The food truck guy?" Hope eyed him over the lid of her coffee. "I mean, he was happy you had exact change and all but I don't think that he was that into—"

"No, not _him_ ," Scott said. "Jimmy."

Hope arched an eyebrow in a way that did a pretty good job of communicating that she was jet-lagged as all hell and put up with him on sufferance at the best of times. 

Scott sighed. "Jimmy? Agent Woo?"

Both of Hope's eyebrows rose to meet her hairline. "The FBI agent who was in charge of making sure you were under house arrest... asked _you_ out?"

Of all the places she could have put the emphasis in that sentence, Scott thought, Hope had to put it _there_? Rude. 

"Is that so surprising?" Scott said as they started walking again, crossing the street to a small park and scoping out a free bench. "Is—okay, yes, well, maybe it is a little surprising. But I've got qualities! And it's possible that there could have been, you know, a vibe that I didn't pick up on right away." Scott's partial awareness of vibes like that was one reason why he'd ended up giving a sloppy hand job to a guy called Mike at a Pearl Jam concert back in '96.

Hope took a considering sip of her coffee. "It could be mind control, I suppose. There've been some rumours about people hacking Chitauri technology, using—"

"Hey!" Scott said around a mouthful of taco, "are you saying he'd have to be under mind control to want to ask me out?" A bit of jalapeño fell off and landed on his shirt.

"Or, well, your butt is cute?" Hope offered after a moment. 

"You think that's it? Huh." Scott chewed on another bite of taco and stared off into the mid-distance. He did have a cute butt. It was the kind of asset that could distract a person, even if that person was a goody two-shoes FBI agent. Some kind of momentary distraction made a lot more sense than Agent Woo really meaning to ask out a very newly ex-con. "I guess I'll just chalk it up to, you know..." He waggled his non-taco-holding hand. 

"Okay," Hope said, knocking back the last of her coffee. "Look, about that Hydra base—"

"One of those Missed Connections, I guess. _Ant-Man Looks for Popo-Slash-Youth Pastor, m4m (San Francisco)_." It wasn't like Scott was going to see the guy again anyway. If he was smart about it, Jimmy—Agent Woo—wouldn't have any more reason to stop by Scott's apartment, and Scott didn't have a number for him. 

"He's a _youth pastor_?"

"Right?" said Scott. "Had to have been like a glitch in his system or something."

"I guess so," Hope said, and then pointedly changed the subject, with what Scott thought was pretty good grace considering she was running on very little sleep and her ex was talking at her about how distracting his butt was.

*****

And it was totally stupid but Scott was starting to understand why people put Missed Connections notices up on Craigslist. Not the ones that were written by people with _issues_ , obviously, but the other ones—the ones written by people who'd caught someone's eye across a subway car, or bumped into someone on their way out of a Starbucks, or passed someone jogging in a park. The people who'd only had a split second together but who thought maybe, maybe, that moment should have been something more. 

Scott's analogy was possibly a little bit undercut by the fact that he'd seen Jimmy Woo at least once a month for two whole years, and never once had what Maggie had always called a _bing_ moment. 

("You know," she'd said, laughing, not long after they first got together, not long before Scott would fuck it all up spectacularly and not for the last time, "a _bing_ moment. When your eyes meet across a crowded room and you think, yep, you and me, and you just know the feeling's mutual? That's a _bing_ moment."

She'd made little jazz hands every time she said the word _bing_ , and Scott had wondered how the hell he'd gotten so lucky.)

But Scott couldn't stop thinking about Jimmy now, which made him wonder if there should be some whole new section of Craiglist that was for this particular kind of Missed Connection—the one where you didn't time it right so your _bing_ was off. 

It probably came down to something quantum, he thought morosely. The weirder shit tended to.

*****

It kind of sucked, coming up on your forty-seventh birthday and realising you'd been too much of a dumbass to realise you'd had _bing_ potential with a guy for two whole years, but it wasn't like Scott was pining over Jimmy or anything. 

Which was what Scott told himself until one Monday morning in August, when he was meandering around a store. He was supposed to be picking up his share of Cassie's back-to-school supplies, but so far his basket was obeying the law of Target. You went in there looking for glue and notebooks, you found yourself toting around a bag of pistachios and some Kleenex and a t-shirt with Steve Rogers' face on it. (Was that weird now they were buds? Or at least, according to several very legal documents, co-conspirators? Probably no weirder than the fact that Target was selling t-shirts decorated with the face of a guy who was _technically_ a war criminal. But you know, he was still awesome so whatever.)

Scott was in the electronics section—browsing through the box sets although he didn't even own a DVD player any more, how did they get you like that—when he realised that all the display TVs were suddenly showing the same thing. They were all on mute, but Scott didn't need to hear what the reporters were saying to know that something serious was going down on Alcatraz Island. The channels were showing grainy footage on a loop: the prison seen from Pier 39, a short, sharp explosion, a cloud of dust. Gas leak? Electrical fire? Bomb?

Scott was already reaching into the pocket of his jeans for the matchbox that held his suit when CNN started streaming video from the island itself: shaky and poor quality, but showing a crowd of panicking, shouting tourists. In the middle of them was Jimmy Woo, battling his way through and clearly searching for something.

"Yup. Bomb," Scott said, and ran.

*****

He hopped on two different ants to get him down to the water's edge, and then lucked out by swinging onto the skid of a police chopper that was heading out to the island. A great plume of smoke was rising up from Alcatraz, solid-seeming and green-tinged, and it was making noise. Not anything that Scott could hear, but he could feel it rattling through his ribcage as the helicopter got closer: it was like a cat whose self-satisfied purr was so low it was right on the edge of human hearing. The smoke definitely wasn't natural, whatever it was, even if—especially since—it seemed to Scott like it was alive. What the fuck was going on? 

The chopper had been sent out to observe, not to land, but it hovered close enough to Alcatraz for Scott to be in range to summon an ant from there. His ride was jittery, clearly reluctant to get too close to the centre of the island and the column of smoke. 

"You are clearly a drone full of common sense," Scott told the ant, patting its back as he jumped off just to the east of the main prison block and onto a flat stretch of crumbling asphalt and concrete. That terrible groaning noise was even more noticeable now: like being on the verge of sleep but aware of a truck passing down the street outside your window and setting the glass to humming. "Ugh. Mondays."

Between where the smoke cloud was coming from, what he'd glimpsed on TV, and his memories of that one ill-fated school outing, Scott was fairly certain that the tourists were inside the prison. He let himself expand to full size as he ran across to the stretch of steep rock that led to the base of the island's lighthouse and scrambled up it. He couldn't hear anything other than the noise—no voices, no screams, not even the caw of a seagull—which wasn't particularly reassuring. 

This was San Francisco, after all, where the seagulls were particularly angry assholes. 

Around the lighthouse and up to the main entrance where the doors were wide open. Scott took a deep breath. He'd promised Cassie that he'd never set foot in a prison again, and if you got technical about it—the Raft was strictly speaking a jail, not a prison, and it wasn't like anyone had bothered formerly charging them before throwing them in there—Scott hadn't broken that promise. 

"All in a good cause though, right? Right," he told himself as he shrank back down and headed inside. He was there to figure out what the hell was going on, and get Jimmy and the others out. It didn't matter—shouldn't matter—that he was back inside a place like this, with the scuffed floors and that particular shade of green on the walls that Scott had never, not once, seen outside of an institution. Cold sweat trickled down his back. "Fuckity fuck."

The iron gate that led into the cell blocks was shut and locked, but it was no problem for Scott to hop through the beige-painted bars. Taking that one step was like travelling dozens of storeys in a fast elevator. Scott's ears popped and his stomach lurched and all of a sudden he could _hear_ : dozens of people crying out, yelling, their voices made indistinct by the overwhelming roar of what sounded like what you got if you crossed a hurricane with a sandstorm. The tourists were crowded up against the near end of the cell block, most of them looking up wide-eyed at where the ceiling used to be. Now it was just clear blue sky overhead—at least, what bits of the sky you could see through the smoke column. Crumbling bits of masonry fell from the remains of the roof every so often, and when they came into contact with the smoke they just seemed to... fizzle out. Not pass through the smoke, just combust into little showers of green sparks. 

Scott's degree was in electrical engineering, not physics, but he was going to go out on a limb here and say that shit was neither natural nor good. Especially not since the column of smoke was slowly but visibly expanding. 

First things first. There was no key in the gate, but that wasn't much of an obstacle. Scott swarmed up one of the bars and then into the lock mechanism. The mortice lock was a piece of cake and Scott timed his jump back out so to amplify his kinetic energy so he'd have maximum momentum as he arced back and grew back to normal size, crashing his shoulder into the gate and heaving it open. 

"Okay, everybody out! C'mon, hurry, move it!" Scott yelled, straining to make himself heard over the dull rumbling. "Get down to the dock, go!" Once they noticed him waving his arms and pointing at the now-open gate, the tourists didn't have to be told twice. They scrambled out, parents tugging kids along by the jacket, couples clinging to one another's hand, and if anyone was curious about who the hell Scott was or where he'd come from, they clearly weren't in the mood to stop and ask questions. Once the last person was through—a sweaty-faced guy in a 49ers jersey—Scott could face the second thing on his agenda. You know, figure out what the hell was going on and stop it, with a side order of finding Jimmy. 

Scott went further into the cell block, and it turned out that the "finding Jimmy" part wasn't going to be so tough. Near the base of the column of smoke, Jimmy was locked in a good old-fashioned fist-fight with a guy who was dressed like a bad guy from a Saturday morning cartoon—were there really sequins on that cape? He was giving at least as good as he got, though he was favouring his left side and the other guy had some sort of energy shield thingummy strapped to one of his forearms that he used to block Jimmy's blows. 

"Hey, Disco Skeletor," Scott shouted. "Why don't you take on someone with your kind of fashion sense?"

Disco Skeletor didn't seem too enthusiastic about that suggestion, and in fact seemed dismissive of Scott to an extent that he, personally, found a bit uncalled for. Scott had fought alongside _Captain America himself_ and was a legit threat, thank you so much. 

To be fair, Jimmy had taken advantage of Disco Skeletor's momentary distraction to produce a ceramic knife and what looked weirdly like a miniature version of Han Solo's blaster from somewhere inside his suit jacket. Scott reminded himself, very firmly, that now was a bad time to get a boner, because getting a boner inside the suit was just never a good idea. (Hank Pym had engineered a cup that could let you walk away from a mule kick, but comfort? Not so much.)

"One last time, McAllister," Jimmy said. "Turn off the device now, and Director Hill is prepared to—"

"Do I look like I give a _shit_ what that bitch wants?" McAllister snarled. "You and those other Level 5 pissants, the way you were always sneering at me, always looking down your noses, always thinking you know what's best—"

"You really don't, you know," Scott said, taking a cautious few steps forward. If he could just get close enough.... 

McAllister whirled around to look at Scott. Definitely sequins on the cape; fringe, too. Wow. "Don't what? Who the hell _are_ you, anyway?"

"Don't look like you give a shit about what Director Hill wants," Scott said, and watched as Jimmy took advantage of McAllister's distraction to cold-cock him over the head with the blaster gun. McAllister's eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the floor in a heap of fabric. 

Scott hurried over and, figuring that since they were in Alcatraz it only made sense, hauled McAllister's limp body into one of the cells and dumped him there. Jimmy was already fiddling with a small box on the ground, something that looked like a Rubik's Cube on acid. Scott figured it was a pretty high stakes one, though, what with the way Jimmy mumbled under his breath to himself as his long fingers manipulated the surface. Finally something clicked, the box turned a dull blue, and the column of smoke vanished, leaving behind a shower of dust and the smell of burnt toast. 

Jimmy sat back on his heels with a shaky sigh. 

Even though that grinding, rumbling roar was now gone, Scott's head still rang, so he did the only thing he could. He took off the helmet and blurted out, "Why the hell are you _wet_?"

Jimmy, in fact, was entirely soaked, his hair in disarray and his dress shirt stuck to him in a way that proved he did not skip abs day at the gym. "I swam."

"To _Alcatraz_?" Scott said. 

"Not the whole way," Jimmy said witheringly, like Scott was the one who'd said something dumb. 

Scott would have been offended, if not for the way something behind his rib cage was, very insistently, going _bing_. "Well, that's, uh, good for you? And it looks like you had things under control anyway, so I guess I'll just—so this whole time, you weren't with the FBI?"

"Technically, the FBI was paying my salary, so as far as the IRS is concerned, I told you the truth," Jimmy said as he heaved himself up off the ground. He swayed for a moment, his bad leg buckling and refusing to hold his weight, and Scott reached out to help support him. "And you're hardly in a position to judge when it comes to misleading people about your occupation."

Scott opened his mouth. He closed his mouth. "I don't have a response to that that's not incriminating, do I?"

"If you're asking a law enforcement official to help you come up with a more effective way to lie to law enforcement," Jimmy said mildly, "I'm starting to see how you got caught so often."

Scott closed his eyes. So much for his promise to Cassie. "You know, if you could even just give me a head start..."

"I'm not going to arrest you."

Scott opened one eye. "You're not?"

"No. At least not now. Consider it a thank you for helping to get all of those people out of here."

"Plus let me guess, SHIELD wants me for my body." Scott opened the other eye. He was maybe only half as dumb as he looked; he could tell where this was going. "Or technically what's on my body, so locking me up isn't in your interest right now."

Jimmy looked down at Scott's body, and the tips of his ears went honest-to-God red, and Scott heard a _bing_ so loud it was deafening. Scott was still holding him, his hand clutching Jimmy's upper arm, and Jimmy hadn't moved away once he'd got his balance—if anything, he'd curved a little closer. 

"You really _were_ asking me out! For real!" Scott crowed. 

Jimmy blanched. "I don't know what you're—"

"Oh please," Scott said, waggling his free hand. "So maybe I was a little slow on the uptake then, but guess what?"

"What?" Jimmy said warily. He was clearly running through a couple of worst-case scenarios in his head right now, and God help him but Scott was starting to find that cute. 

"I think I got used to you coming by every few weeks, and then I sort of got to like it. And now that I don't get to see you anymore, I miss it. So I guess what I'm saying is... Dinner? I'm free tonight if you want, that Greek place down the block from me is pretty good."

"I just got shot in the leg by misappropriated alien technology," Jimmy said flatly. 

"Oh," Scott said. Awkward.

"But... tomorrow at eight sounds good."

" _Oh_ ," Scott said, and beamed at him. 

He could hear the sound of helicopters overhead. The place was going to be crawling with cops and journalists and SHIELD agents and National Parks employees soon enough. Time for Scott to skedaddle, if he was smart. It was just pretty tough to have common sense when Jimmy was smiling back at him and Scott's _bing_ sense was making up for lost time. 

"You mind if I try something?" Scott asked. 

"Knock yourself out," Jimmy said. 

So Scott kissed him, and Jimmy wrapped his arms around him and kissed him back—and if it was suddenly, blessedly quiet inside Scott's head, it wasn't because he'd missed the bing this time. It was because this was what came after.


End file.
